Simple hack: buy wireless card and it works

I went to OfficeMax the other day for something unreleased and noticed that they were selling 'My Essentials 802.11g wireless' cards for $40.00 each. Since I'm working on a FreeBSD-based wireless picture frame for my wife for Christmas, I thought I'd buy one and see if they worked. To my suprise, they do:

ath0: mem xxxxxxxx at device 0.0 on cardbus0
ath0: Ethernet Address 00:17:3f:xx:xx:xx
ath0: mac 7.8 phy 4.5 radio 5.6

The LEDs don't work on this card. You can enable soft led operations in the ath driver if you want the LED to function:

sysctl dev.ath.0.softled=1

More work would be needed to have the "LINK" light work from the ath driver, but not that much more. All the necessary functions appear to be exposed. The hard part may be finding the GPIO pin for the link LED, since none of the first 20 pins seems to do the trick. And after messing around with them for a while, both LEDs are on solid no matter what.

Still, for a card going into an appliance, this makes a great choice. Plus an easy hacking project if someone wanted the leds to always work.